The Trump Convention: A Painful Moment for the Bush Family Network

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A film showing former President George W. Bush at the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla. Few alumni of the Bush White House will attend this year’s convention.CreditDamon Winter/The New York Times

CLEVELAND — Amid the balloons and parties, speeches and spectacle, one faction of the Republican Party is almost invisible at the national convention this week: the Bush family network.

Representatives of the last Republican White House are effectively in exile from presidential politics these days, dispirited by their party’s embrace of Donald J. Trump, the nominee, and feeling betrayed by former friends who are backing him.

As Mr. Trump was nominated, former President George W. Bush planned to be on his Crawford, Tex., ranch, painting and bike riding. His former secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, was to be in her Stanford University office working on a new book about democracy, and former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida would, he wrote in a terse email, be “working in Miami.”

They are hardly the only ones staying away. An email sent to alumni of Mr. Bush’s administration this month listing those former Bush officials going to Cleveland was notable mostly because of who was not included: no former cabinet officials or members of the White House senior staff.

The former president, who turned 70 this month, has taken a vow of silence about Mr. Trump in public. But he and his longtime loyalists are confounded about what has happened in their party, and by how little appeal the Bush brand of politics carries these days.

“I’m very fearful for my republic,” said Marc Racicot, the former Montana governor who was chairman of Mr. Bush’s re-election campaign and of the Republican National Committee. “I thought my fellow citizens would exercise the judgment to steer the country in the right direction.”

Carlos Gutierrez, who served as commerce secretary to Mr. Bush, said in a telephone interview, “People are puzzled by what happened, wondering how did we let this happen.”

Addressing a few hundred Republican donors clad in blazers and polo shirts at a fund-raiser for Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri outside St. Louis last month, Mr. Bush did not mention Mr. Trump by name but issued an unmistakable warning about the dangers of Mr. Trump’s politics.

“He said he was concerned about three isms: protectionism, isolationism and nativism,” recalled John C. Danforth, a former senator and United Nations ambassador for Mr. Bush who attended the $1,000-a-person dinner. “I think that said a lot.”

The departure represented by Mr. Trump is dramatic.

The nominee, who has electrified audiences with jeremiads against Hispanics and Muslims, has disregarded the former president’s effort to create a durable Republican majority by broadening the party’s appeal to a rapidly changing country. He has even more thoroughly rejected Mr. Bush’s worldview, scorning the interventionist and pro-free trade and immigration policies that were at the heart of his two terms as president.

And with his penchant for cutting ridicule and crude insults, Mr. Trump represents personal qualities that are the antithesis of Mr. Bush’s mix of Christianity and old-money restraint.

“It would be like if George Wallace had succeeded John F. Kennedy and the New Frontiersmen,” said Peter Wehner, a senior official in Mr. Bush’s White House.

But as Jeb Bush and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida learned in their failed campaigns, there was little appetite in the Republican primary electorate for a restoration of “compassionate conservatism” or anything resembling the former president’s agenda. Voters wanted a more hard-line approach.

“Our party is changing,” said Matt Schlapp, who was White House political director in Mr. Bush’s first term, pointing to rising concern over what he called American “sovereignty.”

“People feel like they’ve lost the country,” Mr. Schlapp said of today’s Republican voters.

And many in Mr. Bush’s circle feel as though they have lost their party, at least for now.

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On the first day of the convention on Monday, a lot of things did not go as anticipated. The Republican Party sought to show that it had unified behind Donald J. Trump. Instead some delegates tried to stage a last-ditch revolt.Published OnJuly 19, 2016CreditImage by Damon Winter/The New York Times

Mr. Bush addressed the 2008 convention by video (Hurricane Gustav was bearing down on the Gulf Coast) and was featured alongside his father in a brief video during the 2012 convention. But if neither John McCain nor Mitt Romney, the last two Republican nominees, was eager to highlight the unpopular Mr. Bush, there were still ample reminders of him at their conventions.

Ms. Rice, who worked in both Bush administrations, gave one of the best-received prime-time speeches in 2012. And plenty of Mr. Bush’s loyalists were at both conventions, either as advisers to Mr. McCain or Mr. Romney, or because they always attended the party convention, which served as an informal reunion for old friends and colleagues.

This time, though, there will be no high-profile Bush veteran addressing the delegates. The most prominent figure here from the administration will probably be Karl Rove, who is attending both party conventions this year in his role as a Fox News commentator.

While many in the Bush circle are discouraged about Mr. Trump, they are also enjoying a bit of schadenfreude over the candidate’s struggles.

Mr. Trump tormented not just Jeb Bush in the primary; he also assailed George W. Bush in remarkably pointed terms, arguing that the Iraq war was built on lies and that the former president had little national security record to stand on because the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks took place on his watch. But the contempt Bush loyalists have for Mr. Trump is driven by something deeper than his primary-season attacks.

Unlike the last two presidential races, in which the Republican nominees were largely aligned with Mr. Bush’s free-market worldview, this campaign may have profound implications for the Bush legacy. Mr. Trump’s success — or defeat — in the election could render a verdict on Mr. Bush’s presidency and vision of conservatism.

“If Donald Trump wins, he will, by definition, have created a new template of success for Republicans,” said Ari Fleischer, Mr. Bush’s first White House press secretary. “But if he loses, and particularly if he is crushed, it will reset the party back more in the direction of President Bush.”

Because Mr. Trump represents something far greater in the eyes of the Bush veterans than just an unfortunate party nominee, their determination to defeat him has become more intense.

The vast majority of the approximately three dozen veterans of Mr. Bush’s administration contacted for this article indicated that they would not cast a ballot for Mr. Trump.

“I can count on one hand the number of people I worked with who are supporting Trump,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a former Bush State Department official who has been calling his onetime colleagues to solicit support for the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton.

A handful of high-level former Bush officials will support him. Most prominent is former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has indicated to former colleagues that with his daughter on the Wyoming ballot for Congress this year, he had little choice. That is an understandable rationale to many in the Bush orbit.

But there is far less charity offered to two other former Bush staff members who have been outspoken on television and social media about their support for Mr. Trump: Mr. Fleischer and Mr. Schlapp.

After Mr. Fleischer announced his support on Twitter for Mr. Trump in May, one of his former colleagues, Tony Fratto, responded: “Then we don’t have anything to say to each other.”

In an interview, Mr. Fratto, who served in the Bush Treasury Department and White House, was still angry. “You were the White House spokesperson when Trump said the president lied the country into the death and maiming of people unnecessarily,” he said of Mr. Fleischer. “How can Ari be O.K. with that?”

Such a betrayal, Mr. Fratto said, was “unforgivable.”

Mr. Fleischer said he still considered Mr. Fratto a friend, but lamented that “Trump has split the party.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Bush Family Network, Dispirited by Trump, Largely Avoids Cleveland. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe